Posts tagged ‘Pennsylvania’

Did you ever feel like that kid in the poster for the classic movie “Home Alone” who is clutching his face with both hands, mouth agape in shock at having to foil two nitwit burglars?

I did when I saw the initial natural gas production rates that have come out of some recent Utica Shale wells. Although it wasn’t out of shock but sheer awe at the volumes being yielded by wells the Northeast US natural gas-prone play.

Traditional heating oil may be in the last throes of popularity before it makes way for cleaner-burning fuels like natural gas or lower-sulfur distillate grades.

The product is not the chief heating fuel in the US–the Energy Information Administration estimates that about half of US households use natural gas as their primary heating fuel, compared with 6% using heating oil — but it has managed to cling to about a quarter of Northeastern households. That grip is slipping, though.

Pennsylvania will elect a new governor in November and right now, the future does not look promising for incumbent Republican Governor Tom Corbett.

Based on the results of a February release of the most respected polls in the state, the Quinnipiac University Poll, Republican Governor Tom Corbett has little chance of winning re-election. The poll shows 58% of the voters don’t approve of the way he is dealing with the state’s economy, 56% disapprove of the state’s tax structure and 49% dislike the administration’s energy and the environmental policies. It’s not hard to extrapolate from those findings that voters probably are not happy about the taxes the industry pays to operate in the Keystone State.

Clearly the political environment has changed a lot since 2010 when most of the state was seemingly very gung-ho about the perceived benefits of drilling. The Quinnipiac Poll says Corbett now has a negative 36% to 52% approval rating and trails all five possible Democratic challengers. In fact, anyone of them would beat Corbett in a general election.

Shell’s $4 billion proposal to build a petrochemical complex on the site of the former Horsehead Corp. zinc smelter in Monaca, Pennsylvania, was on display Wednesday at two events at a banquet facility overlooking a golf course near the community, which lies about 30 miles northwest of Pittsburgh.

If constructed, Shell’s ethane cracker would feed production of 1.5 million mt/year of ethylene, 500,000 mt/year of gas-phased high density polyethylene, 500,000 mt/year of slurry HDPE, and 500,000 mt/year of linear low density polyethylene. Shell and Horsehead have extended Shell’s option to buy the Horsehead site along the Ohio River three times, most recently in December.

But the details of the proposal were not the main focus of Wednesday’s event. There was no PowerPoint presentation. No Q&A session. No leaflets. And significantly, still no indication that the project had been clearly decided as a “go.”

In the last five years Pennsylvania has grown from a marginal natural gas producer to an 8 Bcf/d-plus behemoth that will pass Louisiana as the US’s second most productive state this year. (Texas is far and away the top producer with more than 22 Bcf/d of gas production.)

In the heart of the Marcellus Shale gas boom, the fracking industry was dealt a blow this past week when the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court ruled that the state’s sweeping Marcellus Shale law, known as Act 13, was unconstitutional.

The high court’s 4-2 ruling, 14 months in the making, comes just as Marcellus production is poised to exceed 13 Bcf/d this month, skyrocketing from less than 2 Bcf/d pulled from the play just three years ago.

That data from the Energy Information Administration, means the Marcellus is expected to comprise 18% of total U.S. natural gas production in December.

A freight train rolls northwest through Houston on December 14, 2013. The US backlog for rail cars that can carry crude is estimated at two years. (Photo by the author)

It might be news to management there, but the Phillips 66 refinery in Central California is the best place to ship Bakken crude right now.

The refinery in Arroyo Grande, 1,600 miles from the North Dakota shale play, is identified in consulting firm Maine Pointe’s recent study of crude-by-rail economics as the ideal spot for the coveted oil at a Brent/WTI spread of $11.56/b — not too far from the second-month Brent-WTI spread of $11.75/b on Thursday.

The use of hydraulic fracturing to develop Pennsylvania’s massive shale formations is dividing candidates running for the Democrats’ nomination to run for Pennsylvania governor.

Fracking became a hot issue after the Democratic State Committee voted 118-81 for a statewide moratorium on fracking. Following the June 15 vote, former Democrat Governor Ed Rendell told the Patriot-News newspaper the resolution was “very ill-advised.”

Cabot Oil and Gas, a company that is no stranger to controversy, has leased a farm in Susquehanna County that is, to say the least, historically sensitive.

The property belongs to M. Denise Dennis, a writer who until recently was an outspoken critic of the hydraulic fracturing used to release the natural gas molecules from shale formations. › Continue Reading

No one in Pennsylvania, so far, has demanded Chesapeake Energy be banished forever from the state because of the accidental discharge April 19 of a lot of frac water at a Marcellus Shale gas well in Bradford County. One blogger called it the “Macondo moment” for natural gas, but no one else has picked up that thread.